The Ghost Network (32 page)

In the shop, Berliner and Taer pretended to browse while Nix actually did. She watched a tank full of jellyfish, a species colloquially called “moon jellies.” She gazed at their ghostly, translucent bodies until the clerk, a middle-aged woman named Nancy Franklin, noticed her intensity and sidled over to give Nix her sales pitch. With the clerk conveniently distracted, Taer and Berliner searched the small shop for a way into the unused train station below. They didn’t find anything. Nix asked Berliner if they had the money to buy a large tank and jellyfish to swim in it. They didn’t, but Berliner agreed to buy her a bowl of small bioluminescent fish. While filling out the delivery slip with his
pied-à-terre
’s address, Berliner casually mentioned he might know the Schakowsky brothers from either “a political group” or the Urban Planning Committee, testing the waters. Franklin promised to pass on his greeting to the owners.

Nix was elated with her purchase. She curled her arm around Taer’s as they walked down the street. Taer appreciated the attention but she was frustrated by not finding anything and batted Nix away. They decided to split up; Berliner would go to meet Nina Johnson at the Chicago Archives to try to find a blueprint or a city survey of
the building that housed the Old Town Aquarium, while Nix and Taer returned to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters. Taer would look for anything they had missed on The Ghost Network. Nix would tend to her fish.

At the Chicago Archives, Berliner met Johnson. She fetched him the blueprints of the Old Town Aquarium’s building as well as the last architectural survey the city conducted of the unused train station below, when Daley still hoped to build the Party Line. In their examination of the blueprints, Berliner found plans for a hidden staircase, leading into a basement area.

Johnson locked the door of the Archives, took off her dress, and unscrewed the bolts that held one of the benches to the floor. She and Berliner copulated while the bench rocked and scraped across the maple wooden flooring.

Taer and Nix’s return to the Racine building was equally exciting. As they descended into the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, they noticed that the security door had been tampered with. Someone had tried to take the heavy steel door off at its hinges. The New Society was the most likely culprit, and Nix panicked. She insisted that they move out. Taer agreed, and called Berliner to hurry home to help. The plan was to transfer everything to Berliner’s
pied-à-terre
.

When Berliner arrived, they began packing for their quick move. Taer wrapped the external hard drives that stored The Ghost Network’s data in her heaviest sweaters. She and Nix were transferring them into a backpack when a bomb went off in the Racine building.

*
At some point, Cyrus visited this house. —CD

†
During a conversation we had about her and Taer’s sex life, Nix also mentioned to me that she masturbated while she was in this bathtub. I asked her if she had ever thought about Taer while “jerking off” (my words) and she told me the bathtub had reminded her of Taer. Nix said, “I obviously didn’t want Taer to have been kidnapped too, but I wanted her there with me. I thought about her and, yeah, I masturbated. Which I know sounds strange, but she and I, we had this thing about bathtubs and faucets and we were always having sex in the tub. It started out by us kinda making fun of Nick’s thing, and then, I don’t know. It escalated. So, I did jerk off about her that once. And then more lately, you know, since the Lake Michigan thing.” —CD

‡
The waitress forced Nix to pose for cell phone photos to give to the police. Nix used them for her 2010 Christmas card.

§
Fredrick Doyle,
Sugar, Cotton, and Boys Fighting Boys
(New York: Random House, 2001), 12.

ǁ
Incidentally, the man who actually designed the train line, William Alexander Carnevale, Jr., grew up in the South Chicago industrial neighborhood now called Burnside. Locals refer to the neighborhood as “The Triangle” because it is fenced in by three railroad tracks: the Illinois Central Line on the west, the Rock Island Line on the south, and the New York Central Line at the east. Carnevale’s father was a blue-collar factory worker in the Burnside Steel Mill. W. A. Carnevale, Sr., continued to live in the neighborhood even when the factories closed and white flight reached a fever pitch. W.A. Jr. eventually died in the neighborhood where he was born on December 25, 1981. He was visiting his ailing father and, on his way back to his Wicker Park apartment, caught a stray bullet during a sudden burst of gang violence. He bled to death on the street, calling for help that didn’t come.

a
Sal Barbar, “The City of Impossible Trains,”
Chicago Tribune
, March 3, 1957; 68.

The explosion knocked Taer, Berliner, and Nix across the room, into the wall, as paint chips and wood splinters rained on their heads and the rooms of the Urban Planning Committee shook. Luckily, the small amount of plastic explosive the New Society had planted wasn’t designed to bring down the building, just destroy the steel door, so Taer, Berliner, and Nix suffered only small cuts and bruises. Within a few seconds, the shaking stopped, and they picked themselves up.

Berliner knew they had to leave the Urban Planning Committee to the New Society, to give up the space he’d devoted a decade of his life, but he wouldn’t let them take the small physical archives of the New Situationists and the UPC.

“I was shouting at Gina and Cait, probably really incoherently, trying to make them understand we needed to take everything or ruin it, so Ali and Peaches couldn’t have it,” Berliner later told me.

“You weren’t incoherent,” Nix said.

Berliner pulled several half-empty cans of white paint out of a cabinet and, standing on Molly’s desk, sloshed paint over The Ghost Network on the wall. Taer threw the desktop computer to the floor
and beat it into bits with a chair. Nix stuffed the remaining external hard drives and Molly’s notebook into her messenger bag. Berliner poured paint on the maps. When they heard footsteps and voices in the hallway, they fled through the secret door in the northwest corner of the office. As they raced up the stairs, Taer, Nix, and Berliner heard a scream and a crash—someone had fallen through the trap door.

“I hope it was that bitch,” Nix said, meaning Peaches. They hurried away from the building.

It wasn’t “that bitch” who had fallen; it was Ali. She shattered the bones in her left elbow and left leg; she also cracked three ribs. Two other members of the New Society carried her out of the building and called an ambulance. (They told the EMTs she had climbed to the roof of the alcove in front of the building and fallen off.) The New Society had reached the heart of the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, but their small hunting party of ten had already been diminished by three.

When they saw the wreckage of the computer and the mess on the wall, the members of the New Society frantically tried to mop up the paint with their scarves and sweaters, while Peaches, her arm in a sling, smashed pieces of computer under her snow boots. She got paint all over her clothes and good hand as she tried to find some unsullied documents under a mound of paint-soaked maps. She didn’t find anything. Frustrated, she sent two of her team to find Taer, Berliner, and Nix, and told the rest of them to stop looking for something and run. Peaches set fire to a pile of maps soaked in paint and the Racine building burned.

Taer, Berliner, and Nix moved as fast as they could down Armitage. They didn’t run into anyone, but they couldn’t hide on the sidewalks brightly illuminated by streetlamps. They didn’t know if anyone from the New Society would follow them, but just in case, they
took a long, inefficient route to their destination. They walked, looking over their shoulders, to the L station at Armitage and North Sheffield Avenue. They took the Brown Line one stop south, to the Sedgwick station, exiting the car just as the doors closed. They doubled back, taking the Brown Line north to Fullerton, where they switched to the Red Line and rode to the Grand Station. They left the L behind and walked to Berliner’s
pied-à-terre
.

Berliner offered Taer and Nix the semi-hidden second bedroom, but instead the three of them piled into the main bed and spooned together, trying to feel protected and safe. Berliner slept, Nix slept, but they said Taer’s anxious fervor kept her awake all night. The adrenaline that had surged through her body in the moments after the explosion didn’t dissipate. At 8:30 the next morning, Nix would’ve preferred to stay asleep, but Taer shook her and Berliner awake. She had already made a Dunkin Donuts run. The Old Town Aquarium opened at 9 a.m. and she wanted to get going.

Nancy Franklin was, again, manning the store and the jellyfish, but this time she greeted Berliner warmly, as if she knew him. According to Berliner, she said something like: “Jim and Ian said you are friends with Antoinette Monson. You should’ve mentioned that the other day and I would’ve let you do whatever you wanted.” Franklin led them to the emergency exit, disabled the alarm, and pointed the way to a narrow passage which led to the staircase Berliner had seen on the blueprints of the building. Taer descended into the darkness without a second thought.

The staircase wasn’t very deep but it took them a long time to reach the bottom because it was narrow, unlit, and unstable. At the base of the staircase, Berliner felt around for the breaker box—subway regulations during the year the station was built called for breakers at the foot of every service staircase. Berliner opened his cell phone and shone his light against the wall. He found the breaker and flicked the switches. All of the light fixtures on the ceiling,
ornate 1920s-style chandeliers strung with heavy crystals, lit up.
*
The station stretched out in front of them. In some ways, a subway station is the perfect secret space in Chicago. Even though the L trains run underground for huge distances, everyone in Chicago still thinks of public transit as something hovering above the city rather than creeping below.

Continuing her obsessive self-documentation, Taer turned on her iPhone voice recorder.

“It’s pretty,” Nix said, her voice echoing against the tiled walls. “I mean, like, it looks fancy, like Union Station.”

Berliner sneezed. “I’m allergic to dust.”

Taer said, “This place is so rad!”

A few minutes later, bored and underwhelmed after the first train station she visited produced a train so quickly, Taer had changed her tune, grumbling: “What do we do now?”

The three of them explored the train station from end to end, but besides a few benches and a surprising lack of mold or grime, they didn’t find anything. They sat on the benches and waited. Nix laid her head in Taer’s lap and made weak jokes: “They really need to get more funding so that they can add more trains. This wait is ridiculous. I’ll be late for work.” Berliner ate some trail mix Nix had in her purse and answered some of Taer’s questions about his mother. They played the app version of the board game Life on Taer’s iPhone. Two and a half hours went by. Then, as Taer complained about not being able to nap on a hard tile floor, the crystals on the chandelier started to shake.

“Jurassic Park,” Taer said, referring to the scene where the water ripples from the vibration of the footsteps of an approaching T-Rex. A few seconds later, the voice recorder picked up the unmistakable rattling clank of an approaching train.

The train was two cars long, and old, and green. It had probably been in the underground station since the ’50s, but someone had taken care to repaint it. The sides were a forest green, the window frames a yellowish off-white. On the front was a big beacon-like light, and two stoplight fixtures on either side of a door. Where there would’ve been a sign that displayed the name of the next stop, there was instead a sign with a black triangle painted on it.

On Taer’s recording, mixed in with the clatter of the train and the screech of its brakes, I could hear Berliner speaking quickly, though his words were indiscernible to me. Berliner told me he was giving Taer and Nix a quick history of the train car—vintage 1950s, painted like they would’ve been painted—as well as identifying for them the man who was driving the train.

It was David Wilson, the other publicly known, non-incarcerated member of the New Situationists. He stopped the train and stepped onto the platform.

“Hey!” Taer said.

Wilson ignored her and spoke to Berliner instead. “I suppose Marie-Hélène told you something ridiculous.”

“She didn’t tell me anything, she told me she didn’t know anything,” Berliner said. “This is Cait and this is Gina.”

“Okay.”

“Did she know something?” Berliner asked.

“Marie’s the kind of person who wouldn’t tell me if she’d found something out,” David said. “I assumed—”

“I was the one who found it,” Taer interjected. “It wasn’t him.”